Deachman: Years after being welcomed, some Ukrainians are hitting roadblocks

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Melana’s situation isn’t unique.

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In Flesherton, Ont., near Owen Sound, Susanne von Toerne and her husband, Heiner Philipp, have seen other young Ukrainians hit the same roadblock.

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The couple established the Canadian Sunflower Foundation after Russia invaded Ukraine. Initially, their goal was to help arriving families with such necessities as housing, furniture and clothing. More recently, some of the money they’ve raised — mostly from their own pockets — has gone towards university tuition for a couple of students.

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“We’ve been contacted by multiple Ukrainians,” says von Toerne, “but we just couldn’t help them because, I mean, it’s so much money, and our charity is 99 per cent financed by my husband and me.”

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She describes what many Ukrainians like Melana are going through as “a broken biography, a gap in their lives.”

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Von Toerne has since launched an online petition calling on Canadian universities to waive international tuition fees for Ukrainians who, like Melana and her family, came here under the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel program, or CUAET.

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Daniela Borozniak, the national co-ordinator for the Ukrainian Canadian Students’ Union, or SUSK, agrees that Melana’s situation isn’t uncommon.

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“A lot of students are reaching out to us and asking for guidance or help or financial support, or to find a way to be eligible to pay domestic tuition,” she says. “They graduated from Canadian high schools, so why wouldn’t they be eligible?

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“It’s pretty common, especially in the past year.”

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What’s changed, says Borozniak, is that fewer universities are offering the international tuition exemptions they once did.

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She highlights the University of Toronto’s policy change as an example. In previous years since the war in Ukraine began, the school offered exemptions for students who came to Canada under CUAET, with the exemptions continuing until the students attained their degrees. This year, new students will receive that exemption for their first year only; after that, those who still don’t have PR status will have to pay the full international freight. Melana, incidentally, was also accepted to U of T’s architecture program, but any financial benefit she might get from a domestic tuition in her first year would most certainly be more than offset by the expense of moving to, and living in, Toronto.

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Melana’s misfortune is the timing. A Ukrainian of university age who arrived in Canada in 2022 or 2023 could, at some schools, take advantage of the emergency tuition exemptions universities introduced in response to the war, and continue receiving them through graduation.

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Melana was 13 when she arrived, and spent the intervening four years doing pretty much everything Canada might have hoped she would do: attend school, learn English, make friends, graduate with honours.

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But by the time she was old enough for university, some of those emergency measures were disappearing.

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The roots of the problem go back to the way Canada responded to Russia’s invasion. Rather than require Ukrainians fleeing the war to navigate the conventional refugee system, Ottawa created CUAET as an emergency measure that allowed them to come here quickly as temporary residents, able to work and study in Canada. It worked remarkably well.

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Ottawa immigration lawyer Warren Creates cautions against viewing CUAET as a bureaucratic mistake. Ukrainians fleeing the war weren’t automatically refugees in the legal sense; a refugee claim generally requires an individualized fear of persecution, rather than simply exposure to the generalized dangers of war.